Ultrafast Laser Technology and Spectroscopy

Gavin D. Reid and Klaas Wynne

in
Encyclopedia of Analytical Chemistry
R.A. Meyers (Ed.)
pp. 13644–13670
 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester, 2000
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY 1

Ultrafast Laser Technology and transition states. Ultrafast lasers can also be used
to produce laser pulses with enormous peak powers and
and Spectroscopy power densities. This leads to applications such as laser
machining and ablation, generation of electromagnetic
radiation at unusual wavelengths (such as millimeter waves
Gavin D. Reid and X-rays), and multiphoton imaging. The difficulty
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK in applying femtosecond laser pulses is that the broad
Klaas Wynne frequency spectrum can lead to temporal broadening of
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK the pulse on propagation through the experimental set-up.
In this article, we describe the generation and amplification
of femtosecond laser pulses and the various techniques that
have been developed to characterize and manipulate the
1 Introduction 1 pulses.
2 Ultrafast Lasers and Amplifiers 2
2.1 Oscillators 2
2.2 Dispersion and Pulse Broadening 3 1 INTRODUCTION
2.3 Chirped-pulse Amplification 6
2.4 Pulse Recompression 8
Ultrafast spectroscopy has become one of the most active
2.5 Saturation Effects 9
areas of physical chemistry. Rather than postulating
3 Wavelength Conversion 9 mechanisms for chemical and biological reactions, ultra-
3.1 White-light Generation and the short laser pulses can now be used to observe and even
Optical Kerr Effect 9 control the outcome of reactions in real time. Because
3.2 Generation of Ultraviolet and of our improved understanding of reaction pathways,
X-rays 10 the ‘‘arrows’’ describing purported electronic motion in
3.3 Optical Parametric Amplifier for mechanistic organic chemistry are no longer sufficient..1/
Infrared Generation 11 A state-of-the-art laser system can generate 1-J ca. 20-fs
3.4 Noncollinear Optical Parametric pulses and the peak fluence at the focus of these lasers can
Amplification 12 exceed 1020 W cm 2 . In contrast, the total solar flux at the
3.5 Terahertz-pulse Generation and Earth is only 1017 W. An exciting new era is beginning,
Detection 12 which will allow the possibility of using these intense
3.6 Femtosecond Electron Pulses 14 ultrashort laser pulses as sources of short X-ray and elec-
4 Time-resolved Experiments 14 tron pulses. These will reveal the positions of atoms as a
4.1 Auto- and Cross-correlation 14 function of time as reactants proceed to products through
4.2 Pump – Probe Techniques 17 the transition states. More routinely, femtosecond lasers
5 Applications 18 can be used to detect and monitor transient chemical
5.1 The Study of Fast Chemical species in solution or the gas phase, to image living cells
Reactions 18 with micrometer resolution, for laser ablation mass spec-
5.2 Imaging 20 trometry (MS) and micromachining applications, which
5.3 Structure Determination: Electron will all be of immediate interest to the analytical chemist.
Beams and X-rays 21 With the invention of flash photolysis in 1950,.2/ radical
intermediates were observed by light absorption (rather
Acknowledgments 22
than fluorescence) during the progress of a chemical
Abbreviations and Acronyms 22 reaction. When the pulsed laser followed, nanosecond
Related Articles 22 experiments derived from the flash-photolysis technique
References 23 were to reveal the chemistry of singlet states in solution.
However, it was not until the mode-locked ruby.3/ and
Nd : glass.4/ lasers were built in the mid-1960s that the
picosecond timescale became accessible and the field of
Ultrafast laser technology and spectroscopy involves the ‘‘picosecond phenomena’’ was born. When excited-state
use of femtosecond (10 15 s) laser and other (particle) processes were studied in the picosecond domain, such as
sources to study the properties of matter. The extremely energy redistribution in molecules and proteins, proton
short pulse duration allows one to create, detect and study and electron transfer reactions, photoisomerization and
very short-lived transient chemical reaction intermediates dissociation, and relaxation in semiconductors, many

Encyclopedia of Analytical Chemistry

R.A. Meyers (Ed.) Copyright  John Wiley & Sons Ltd
2 GENERAL ARTICLES
measured rate constants were found to be instrument
limited. Nevertheless, important results such as the
observation of the ‘‘inverted region’’ in electron transfer
reactions.5 – 7/ and Kramers’ turnover in excited-state
reactions in solution..8,9/
However, ultrafast spectroscopy was revolutionized in
the 1980s by the invention of the colliding-pulse mode-
locked (CPM) dye laser, which generated 100-fs pulses
in its early form.10/ and 30-fs pulses as the technology
was perfected..11/ This ring laser, operating at about
620 nm, coupled with improvements in dye – amplifier
chains,.12/ allowed the exciting field of femtochemistry
to be developed,.13/ which will be discussed briefly in
section 5.1, and the generation of 6-fs probe pulses,.14/ a
record which stood until very recently. Self mode-locking
in Ti : sapphire-based lasers was discovered.15/ in 1990
and the early 1990s brought a new revolution – simplicity
of use – and, with it, the commercialization of ultrashort
pulse technology. Ti : sapphire oscillators now produce
10 – 20-fs pulses routinely and 4 – 5-fs pulses in optimized
configurations using mirrors designed to reverse the
‘‘chirp’’ introduced by the Ti : sapphire rod. The limiting
factor on the exceptional stability of these oscillators
is the pump source and here diode-pumped solid-state
laser sources are rapidly replacing large, expensive, low-
efficiency ion lasers.
In parallel with improvements in oscillator technol-
ogy, the technique of chirped pulse amplification.16/
using solid-state gain media in regenerative or multi-
pass schemes has replaced the dye – chain amplifiers of
the past. A typical amplifier for routine chemistry appli-
cations produces 1 mJ per pulse at a 1-kHz repetition
rate or 100 mJ at 10 – 20 Hz with a duration between 20
and 100 fs. Moreover, a Ti : sapphire laser oscillator and
amplifier combination can be purchased in a single box
less than 1 m square, operating at mains voltages with
no external water-cooling requirements. Total hands-off
operation is a reality and, in fact, the complete laser
system can be computer controlled.
In the next section, we shall describe the technology
behind Ti : sapphire lasers and amplifiers and discuss how
light at almost any frequency from X-rays to terahertz can
be generated and employed by the chemist. A history of
the field can be found in the papers submitted to the bien-
nial conference ‘Ultrafast Phenomena’, the proceedings
of which are published in the Springer Series in Chemical
Physics, which is now in its eleventh volume..17/
2 ULTRAFAST LASERS AND AMPLIFIERS
2.1 Oscillators
Ultrashort pulses are generated by mode-locked lasers.
By constructive interference, a short pulse is formed
when many longitudinal modes are held in phase in a
laser resonator. Various techniques have been employed,
usually grouped under the terms ‘‘active’’ or ‘‘passive’’
mode locking and descriptions of these can be found in
many standard texts.18,19/ and review articles..20/ Active
mode locking uses a modulator in the laser cavity whereas
passive schemes use a saturable absorber, often a thin
semiconductor film, to lock the relative phases. Modern
solid-state mode-locked lasers use a different scheme
called self-mode-locking and titanium-doped sapphire
(Ti : sapphire) has become by far the most common
laser material for the generation of ultrashort pulses.
Developed in the mid-1980s,.21/ Ti : sapphire has a gain
bandwidth from 700 to 1100 nm peaking around 800 nm,
the broadest of the solid-state materials yet discovered,
high-gain cross-section and extremely good thermal
conductivity. Mode locking is achieved through the action
of an instantaneous nonlinear Kerr lens in the laser rod
(see section 3.1). The peak fluence of the laser approaches
1011 W cm 2 , which is enough to focus the beam as it
travels through the gain medium on each pass. This Kerr
lens then couples the spatial and temporal modes and
maintains phase locking.
A basic oscillator – cavity configuration.22/ is shown
schematically in Figure 1. The laser is pumped by about
5 W from a continuous wave (CW) laser source, usually
now an intracavity-doubled diode-pumped neodymium
laser. This light is focused into the Ti : sapphire rod,
collinearly with the laser axis, through the back of one of
the mirrors. The cavity consists of a Brewster-angle cut
Ti : sapphire rod, 5 mm or less in length, doped to absorb
about 90% of the incident pump radiation, two concave
focusing mirrors placed around it, a high reflector and
an output coupler. A pair of Brewster-cut fused-silica
prisms are inserted to control the spectral dispersion
(chirp) introduced in the laser rod. Dispersion arises
from the variation of the refractive index of the material
across the gain bandwidth of the laser, which can lead to
a temporal separation of the resonant wavelengths and
λ/2
Pump laser (~5W CW)
P4
M2 P3
M1
HR L P2
Ti:sapphire OC
(10%)
P1
Figure 1 Diagram of a basic self-mode-locked Ti : sapphire
oscillator showing the cavity layout. The pulse is coupled out
from the dispersed end of the cavity, which requires a pair of
matching extracavity prisms.
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY
place a limit on the generated bandwidth (see section 2.2).
The cavity dispersion, coupled to the Kerr lens effect, is an
intrinsic part of the pulse-formation process. Ordinarily,
the Kerr lens in the rod would contribute to the overall
loss but this is overcome by a small adjustment to the
resonator. Displacement of one of the curved mirrors
by only ca. 0.5 mm pushes the cavity into pulsed mode.
Here the cavity is corrected for the nonlinear lens effect
and CW operation is restricted. Pulsing is established
by perturbing the cavity to introduce a noise spike,
literally by tapping a mirror mount. This configuration
delivers 12-fs pulses centered at 800 nm with 5 nJ energy
at an 80-MHz repetition rate. Using a shorter rod,
shorter pulses have been obtained.23/ as the dispersion is
better compensated and space – time focusing effects are
controlled. The laser repetition rate can be adjusted by
the insertion of a cavity dumper in a second fold, without
prejudice to the pulse duration..24/ The use of mirrors that
have dispersion opposite to that of the rod.25/ obviates
the need for prisms entirely. Alternatively, a mixture of
prisms and mirrors can be used to generate pulses as
short as 5 fs..26/ At the time of writing, the use of mirrors
with well-defined chirp characteristics is complicated by
the demand for extreme tolerances in the manufacturing
process. Many schemes have been proposed for self-
starting oscillators, perhaps the best of which is the use of
a broadband semiconductor saturable-absorber mirror in
the cavity..27/ Advances in these areas will surely continue.
Other important solid-state materials include Cr : Li-
SAF (chromium-doped lithium– strontium– aluminum
fluoride), which can be pumped by red diode lasers
and operates close to the peak Ti : sapphire wave-
length, and Cr4C : YAG, which lasers at around 1.5 µm,
an important communication wavelength. Cr : forsterite
lases, operating at about 1.2 µm, can be frequency dou-
bled to the visible region and have been used for
imaging applications (see section 5.2). Furthermore, pas-
sively mode-locked frequency-doubled erbium-doped
fiber lasers have been developed commercially. These
lasers operate between 1530 and 1610 nm and efficient
frequency doubling to 765 – 805 nm is possible in period-
ically poled nonlinear crystals (i.e. these lasers can be
used in place of Ti : sapphire for many applications)..28/
They have the advantage of being cheap and extremely
compact since they do not require complicated dispersion-
compensation schemes, owing to the soliton nature
3
Propagation direction
(a)
(b) M Propagation direction
Figure 2 Schematic diagram of the electric field of (a) an undis-
persed Gaussian pulse and (b) the same pulse after traveling
through a positively dispersing medium, M. A frequency sweep
from low to high frequency (right to left) can be observed on
the trace in (b).
Consequently, a 10-fs full width at half-maximum (fwhm)
Gaussian pulse centered at 800 nm has a bandwidth of
94 nm (1466 cm 1 ). When a short pulse travels through
a dispersive medium, the component frequencies are
separated in time. Figure 2(a) and (b) shows the effect of
dispersion on a Gaussian pulse traveling through a piece
of glass. There are two points to note. First, the center
of the pulse is delayed with respect to a pulse traveling
in air. This is usually called the group delay, which is not
a broadening effect. Second, normally dispersive media
such as glass impose a positive frequency sweep or ‘‘chirp’’
on the pulse, meaning that the blue components are
delayed with respect to the red.
In order to get a physical feel for the effect of the chirp,
it is common to consider the phase shift as a function
of frequency w. The phase, j.w/ can be developed as a
power series about the central frequency w0 , assuming
the phase varies only slowly with frequency according to
Equation (1):
j.w/ D j.w0 / C .w w0 /j0 .w0 / C 12 .w w0 /2 j00 .w0 /
C 16 .w w0 /3 j000 .w0 / C 1
24
.w w0 /4 j0000 .w0 / C Ð Ð Ð
.1/
where (Equation 2):
of the pulses supported in the fiber. They can also  
be pumped using cheap large-area telecommunications- 0 @j  00 @2 j 
j .w0 / D , j .w0 / D ,
standard laser-diode sources. Unfortunately, the pulse @j wDw0 @w2 wDw0
duration is limited to a minimum of about 100 fs. 
000 d3 j 
j .w0 / D , etc. .2/
2.2 Dispersion and Pulse Broadening dw3 wDw0

A bandwidth-limited pulse has a spectral width given j0 is the group delay, j00 the group delay dispersion
by the Fourier transform of its time-domain profile. (GDD) [or group velocity dispersion (GVD)] and j000
4 GENERAL ARTICLES

and j0000 are simply the third-order dispersion (TOD) and

fourth-order dispersion (FOD). 1.8
For the sake of simplicity, consider a transform-limited D
Gaussian pulse with a central frequency w0 and a pulse 1.7 C
width (fwhm) tin . Then its electric field, Ein , takes the
form (Equation 3)

n
    1.6
2 ln 2t2
Ein .t/ D E0 exp C iw0 t .3/
tin 2 B
1.5
The electric field after traveling through a dispersive A
medium can be found by transforming Ein to the fre-
500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
quency domain and adding the components from the
phase expansion j.w/ in Equation (1) before transform- (a) λ (nm)
ing back. If we assume only a contribution from the GDD
term, the electric field Eout is given by Equation (4):.18/ 0.2
  C
Eout .t/ D E0 exp i.w0 t j/ .t j0 /2 .4/ D

GVD (103 fs2)

0.1

where (Equation 5) B
0.0
  1 A
t2in
D C 2ij00 .5/ −0.1
2 ln 2
The effects of this dispersion are twofold. First, by −0.2
inspection of the Gaussian part of Eout , tout is analogous
to tin from Ein and is broadened with respect to the 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
input-pulse width by a factor (Equation 6) (b) λ (nm)
s
tout j002 Figure 3 (a) Refractive index versus wavelength data for some
D 1 C 4 16.ln 2/2 .6/ common materials: (A) fused silica, (B) Schott BK7, (C) Schott
tin tin SF10 and (D) sapphire. The points are measured values and the
lines are fits to Sellmeier equations. (b) The GDD for 1 mm of
Second, a frequency sweep is introduced in the output material derived from the fits.
pulse (because the expression in Equation (5) is complex)
with a sign that is opposite to that of j00 . 200
The GDD, j00m , due to material of length lm , is related
Output pulse width (fs)

to the refractive index of the material, n.l/, at the central

150
wavelength, l0 , through its second derivative with respect
to wavelength (Equation 7):
100
00 l30 lm d2 n.l/
jm D .7/
2pc2 dl2
50
Figure 3(a) shows the variation of refractive index with
wavelength for some common materials and Figure 3(b)
shown the GDD. The data were obtained from glass
suppliers and the fits are to Sellmeier-type equations, 0 50 100 150 200
which are then used to take the numerical derivatives for Input pulse width (fs)
use in subsequent calculations.
Using Equations (6) and (7) together with refractive Figure 4 Gaussian pulse width before and after 10 mm of
index data, we can calculate values for the GDD arising fused silica (solid line), corresponding to one or two optical
from a length of material. Figure 4 shows the effect of components. The broadening is due to GDD.
10 mm of fused silica on a short pulse. Silica is one of the
least dispersive materials available and 10 mm is chosen a pulse of around 100 fs in duration, the effect is minimal
to represent one or two optical components, which might but visible. However, a 10-fs pulse is broadened by more
be part of an experimental arrangement. If we consider than a factor of 10!
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY
lp
α γ
ϕ1
b ϕ2
p1
r
(a) p2
p1
p2
r b
lg
γ
(b)
Figure 5 (a) Prism and (b) grating pairs used in the control
of dispersion; r and b indicate the relative paths of arbitrary
long- and short-wavelength rays. j1 is the (Brewster) angle of
incidence at the prism face. The light is reflected in the plane
p1 – p2 in order to remove the spatial dispersion shown.
A good understanding of dispersion is essential in
order to deliver a short pulse to the sample and careful
control of the phase shift is necessary. Fortunately, a
number of designs using prism and grating pairs have been
devised whereby this can be achieved..29/ The two most
important schemes are shown in Figure 5(a) and (b). The
Ti : sapphire oscillator we discussed above uses the prism
pair..30/ This arrangement creates a longer path through
the prism material for the red wavelengths compared with
the blue, introducing a negative dispersion. Provided
that the prism separation, lp (defined tip to tip), is
sufficiently large, the positive dispersion of the material
can be balanced. The prism apex angle is cut such that at
minimum deviation of the center wavelength, the angle
of incidence is the Brewster angle. Here, the Fresnel
reflection losses for the correct linear polarization are
minimized and the system is essentially loss free. The
second scheme is the parallel-grating pair.31/ and, again,
a longer path is created for the red over the blue. Grating
pairs (Figure 6) introduce negative GDD at very modest
separation leading to compact designs but suffer from
losses of close to 50% in total. Both prism and grating
5
f 2f f
G1 G2
L1 L2
M
lg lg
Figure 6 Schematic diagram of a grating-pair pulse stretcher
showing the arrangement for positive dispersion. G1 and G2 are
diffraction gratings, L1 and L2 are identical lenses separated by
twice their focal length, f , and M is a mirror acting to double-pass
the beam through the system. The distance lg – f determines the
total dispersion.
pairs are used in a double-pass arrangement to remove
the spatial dispersion shown in the diagram.
Expressions for calculating the dispersion are given
in Table 1. The equations look a little daunting but
the dispersion can be modeled easily on a personal
computer. To illustrate this point, Figure 7 shows the
total GDD and TOD arising from 4.75 mm of sapphire
balanced against a silica prism pair separated by 60 cm.
This is typical of a Ti : sapphire oscillator. The net GDD
is nearly zero at 800 nm but the net TOD remains
negative at the same wavelength. In fact, it is a general
observation that prism compressors overcompensate the
third-order term. The greater the dispersion of the glass,
the less distance is required, but the contribution of the
third-order term increases. Experimentally, there must
usually be a compromise between prism separation and
material.
Grating pairs are important in amplification and will be
considered in more detail below. Significantly, however,
the sign of the third-order contribution from the grating
pair is opposite to that of the prisms, allowing a combined
approach to dispersion compensation, which has been
used to compress pulses in the 5-fs regime..14/ It can be
more useful to think in terms of the total GDD versus
wavelength with a view to keeping the curve as flat and
as close to zero as possible across the full bandwidth of
the pulse.
Mirror coatings have been developed which can
provide second- and third-order compensation. This
so-called ‘‘chirped’’ mirror reflects each wavelength
from a different depth through the dielectric coat-
ing, which is made up of multiple stacks of varying
thickness. In combination with a prism pair, this tech-
nique has been as successful as the grating/prism
combination without the associated losses. This type
of system will become more common as the mirrors,
tailored to individual requirements, become available
commercially.
6 GENERAL ARTICLES

Table 1 Expressions (Equations 8 – 17) for the dispersion for 50 1000

material, prism and grating pairs
0
500
The accumulated phase in a double-pass prism compressor (see −50

TOD (fs3)
GVD (fs2)
Figure 5a) is
−100 0
2wlp

j.w/ D cos jbluest
2 j2 .8/ −150 −500
c
where j2 is the (frequency-dependent) exit angle, D jbluest −200
2 −1000
j2 .wbluest / is the exit angle of the shortest-wavelength light −250
transmitted by the prism pair:
−300 −1500
1 600 700 800 900 1000
j2 .w/ D arcsinfn sin[a arcsin.n sin j1 /]g .9/
where n is the (frequency-dependent) refractive index of the Wavelength (nm)
prism material, j1 is the (frequency-independent) angle of
incidence on the first prism and a is the prism top angle. If Figure 7 The residual GVD and TOD arising from the balance
the prism compressor is designed for frequency wdesign : between the dispersion of a 4.75-mm Ti : sapphire laser rod and
  the intracavity silica prism pair separated by 60 cm.
1
a D 2 arcsin  q  .10/
1 C n2design 2.3 Chirped-pulse Amplification
h  a i
j1 D arcsin ndesign sin .11/ The amplification of nanojoule-level femtosecond pulses
2 to the millijoule level and above is complicated by the
where ndesign is the refractive index of the prism at the design extremely high peak powers involved. A 1-mJ 20-fs pulse
wavelength. Expressions for the group delay, GVD, TOD and focused to a 100-µm spot size has a peak fluence of
FOD can be obtained by taking derivatives of Equation (8).
5 ð 1012 W cm 2 . The damage threshold of most optical
The group delay in a grating compressor/stretcher (see Figures 5b materials is only a few gigawatts per square centimeter,
and 6) is 1000 times lower. The problem is overcome by stretching
dj P the pulse in time using dispersion to advantage. This is
D .12/
dw c followed by amplification and subsequent recompression
where the optical pathlength is to the original pulse duration. This technique also has the
benefit of eliminating unwanted nonlinear effects in the
1 C cos q
PDL .13/ amplifier materials. A diagram showing the principle of
cos.g q/
  chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) is shown in Figure 8.
2pc The pulse stretcher is a variation of the grating pair
q.w/ D g arcsin sin g .14/
wd described above..32/ A unity-magnification telescope is
with g the angle of incidence on the first grating and d the groove placed between two gratings in an antiparallel rather than
frequency. In the case of a grating compressor, L D lg . In the parallel geometry. This reverses the sign of the dispersion
case of a grating stretcher, L D 2.lg f / cos g.
Expressions for the GVD, TOD and FOD can be obtained by
taking derivatives of Equation (12). For a double-pass grating
compressor/stretcher, the analytical expression
"  2 # 3/2
d2 j l3 L l O S A C
D 1 sin g .15/
dw2 pc2 d2 d

is found, where l is the wavelength.

The accumulated phase in material is
wnlm
j.w/ D .16/ b r
c
b r
where lm is the length of the material. Expressions for the
group delay, GVD, TOD and FOD can be obtained by taking
derivatives of Equation (16). An analytical expression for the Figure 8 Diagram showing the principle of CPA. The oscillator
GVD is output (O) is stretched in the grating stretcher (S) such that the
red frequency components (r) travel ahead of the blue (b). The
d2 j l3 lm d2 n peak intensity is reduced in the process. The stretched pulse
D .17/
dw2 2pc2 dl2 is then amplified in a regenerative or multipass amplifier (A)
before recompression in a grating-pair compressor (C).
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY 7

of the grating pair but otherwise the mathematical Output

expressions given in Table 1 are identical. TFP
FR
The stretching factor is defined by the effective grating M3 Input
separation L D 2.lg f /, where f is the focal length of λ/2
the lens and lg the distance from the lens to the grating. PC TFP
Typically, the pulse duration is increased to 100 ps or
more for efficient extraction of the stored energy. When Pump
lg is equal to f , there is no dispersion, and when lg (a) M1 Ti : sapphire M2
becomes larger than f , the dispersion changes sign. In
practice, the lenses are replaced by a single spherical or Pump Input Output
parabolic mirror in a folded geometry, which eliminates PC
chromatic aberration and allows gold-coated holographic
gratings to be used near their most efficient Littrow Ti : sapphire TFP TFP
(b) M1 M2
angle of incidence, arcsin.lc /2d/, where lc is the central
wavelength and d the line separation of the grating. Other Figure 9 Two schemes for regenerative amplification. The
more sophisticated stretcher designs, one for example design in (a) is often used for kilohertz repetition rate amplifiers
based on an Offner triplet,.33/ have been made but are and that in (b) at a 10 – 20-Hz repetition rate. The Ti : sapphire
rod is usually ca. 20 mm long and doped for 90% absorption.
outside the scope of this discussion. Ignoring the amplifier
TFP, thin-film polarizing beamsplitter; PC, Pockels cell; FR,
for now, the pulse is recompressed using an identical Faraday rotator; l/2, half-wave plate. In (a), M1 is 150 mm
parallel grating pair separated by 2lg . radius of curvature, M2 is 1 m and M3 is flat. In (b) M1 is 20 m
CPA technology developed rapidly during the 1990s. and M2 is C10 m.
Solid-state materials usually have long upper-state radia-
tive lifetimes compared with laser dyes. The large and only a limited spectral bandwidth, and (2) it is only
saturation fluence (1 J cm 2 ) and long storage time (3 µs) necessary to apply a half-wave voltage to the PC at the
of Ti : sapphire make it an ideal amplifier gain material. moment the pulse is switched in or out of the cavity.
Here we shall consider two basic schemes, the regenera- Again, this is to avoid bandwidth-limiting effects.
tive and the multipass amplifier. These operate either at An alternative and perhaps more straightforward
10 – 20 Hz, pumped by a standard Q-switched Nd : YAG design for amplification of femtosecond pulses is based
laser giving up to 100 mJ at 532 nm, or at 1 – 5 kHz pumped on the multipass scheme that has been used in the past
by an intracavity-doubled acousto-optically modulated with dye amplifiers. One of the best arrangements for use
CW Nd : YLF laser, which usually provide more than at kilohertz repetition rates.36/ is shown in Figure 10 and
10 W at 527 nm in a 200-ns pulse. These pump lasers are an example of a 10-Hz system can be found in a paper by
normally flash-lamp pumped but diode-pumped equiva- Chambaret et al..37/ A PC is used to inject a single pulse
lents have appeared commercially in recent months. A from the 80-MHz pulse train into the amplifier, where it
good spatial mode quality is essential and a clean top-hat is allowed to make about eight passes with a slight offset
profile is ideal. at each cycle before being picked off and ejected. The
Figure 9(a) and (b) shows two arrangements for regen-
erative amplification. The arrangement in Figure 9(a) is
often used at 1 kHz..34/ Briefly, a single vertically polar- M3
ized pulse from the oscillator, stretched to ¾100 ps, is
injected into the amplifier using a fast-switching PC. This
is performed by stepping the voltage in two stages, first by
a quarter wave, in order to trap the pulse in the amplifier
cavity, and then up to a half wave for ejection. Typically,
the pulse makes around 12 round trips in the cavity before Ti : sapphire
the gain is saturated. A FR is used to isolate the output
M1 M2
pulse from the input. The arrangement in Figure 9(b).35/
differs in two respects. First, the focusing in the cavity PC
is relaxed in order to remain near the saturation fluence
for the more energetic pulses at 10 Hz. Second, the PC is
used to switch the pulse in and out while it is traveling
Figure 10 Multipass-amplifier arrangement. M1, M2 are 1-m
in opposite directions. This has two great advantages for radius of curvature mirrors and M3 is flat and up to 15 cm wide.
short pulses: (1) there is only one pass made through the A PC and a pair of polarizers are used to inject a single pulse
Faraday isolator, which has extremely large dispersion into the amplifier.
8 GENERAL ARTICLES
pulse incurs significantly less loss in these arrangements,
accrues much less chirp and only one pass is made through
the PC. There is also no need for a Faraday isolator.
Additional power-amplification stages may be added to
increase the pulse energy further. The ring configuration
can be modified by arranging for the beams to cross away
from the focus to achieve a different saturation fluence.
In this configuration, 4 W after recompression at 1 kHz
has been obtained..38/ At kilohertz repetition rates, the
presence of a thermally induced refractive index change
across the spatial profile of the beam must be avoided
in order to achieve diffraction-limited output. This is
achieved either by cooling to 120 K where the thermal
properties of sapphire are much improved.39/ or by using
the lens to advantage..40/ At lower repetition rates, the
medium has time to recover and a thermal lens is usually
not established. In this regime, power amplifiers can be
added to the limit of available pump energy. An additional
complication requires that short pulses of more than a few
millijoules in energy must be recompressed under vacuum
to avoid nonlinear effects and ionization of the air.
2.4 Pulse Recompression
Clearly, the amplification process introduces extra dis-
persion and one of the major considerations in system
8
GVD (103 fs2)
6
A although it has found favor in commercial application
4
2 of incidence of only 6° and 2000 lines mm 1 in the com-
B pressor at 57° , which is reasonably close to Littrow
0 geometry (55° ). Gratings with 2000 lines mm 1 are sig-
C nificantly more efficient than those with 1200 lines mm 1 ,
760 780 800 820 840
λ (nm)
Figure 11 Solid line (A): the net GVD due to the stretcher –
amplifier – compressor combination using 1200 lines mm 1 diff-
raction gratings. The difference between the angle of incidence
in the stretcher compared to the compressor is 10.32° and the
extra grating displacement is 69.4 mm. Dashed line (B): the
same using 1200 lines mm 1 gratings in combination with an
SF18-glass prism pair. The difference between the angle of
incidence in the stretcher compared with the compressor is
3.4° and the extra grating displacement is 26.2 mm. The prism
separation is 2.4 m. Dashed-dotted line (C): the same, using
a 1200 lines mm 1 diffraction grating in the stretcher and an
1800 lines mm 1 grating in the compressor in combination with
an SF10-glass prism pair. The angle of incidence in the stretcher
is 13° and in the compressor 39° . Littrow is 41° . The prism
separation is 1.65 m.
design is the recompression process. The naive approach
is to add additional separation between the gratings in
the pulse compressor and this is how the first systems
were built. Unfortunately, the stretcher and compressor
combination is the most dispersive part of the system and
a mismatch between the two introduces vast third- and
fourth-order contributions to the phase expansion. The
easiest way to correct the TOD is to adjust the angle of
incidence between the stretcher and compressor, which
changes the third-order contribution. Figure 11 (line A)
shows the net group-delay dispersion versus wavelength
for the kilohertz regenerative amplifier discussed above.
The GDD curve is essentially flat over only a narrow
wavelength range although the GDD and TOD are zero
simultaneously at the center wavelength. Table 2 shows
the bandwidth (fwhm) of Gaussian pulses of different
durations. Ideally, the GDD curve should be flat over
perhaps twice the bandwidth to avoid phase distortions.
Recall that the third-order contribution from prism
pairs has the opposite sign to gratings..41/ This fact can
be used to null the GDD, TOD and FOD terms and
this is illustrated in Figure 11 (line B). The difference is
dramatic and this system will support much shorter pulses
at the expense of 2.4 m of pathlength between the SF18
prism pair.
Another method in the recent literature.42/ uses grat-
ings of different groove density in the compressor
compared with the stretcher balanced against additional
round trips in the amplifier. This method, while bet-
ter than the angular adjustment technique, is not as
effective as the grating – prism combination approach,
owing to its inherent compactness. Typical parameters
are a 1200 lines mm 1 grating in the stretcher at an angle
giving improved throughput in the compressor. However,
a combination of mixed gratings and a prism pair as shown
in Figure 11 (line C) is a little better than matched grat-
ings and prisms with the benefit of extra throughput and
reduced prism separation without the need to balance the
Table 2 Pulse duration versus bandwidth
(fwhm) for Gaussian-shaped pulses centered at
800 nm
Gaussian pulse Gaussian bandwidth
duration (fwhm) (fs) (fwhm) (nm)
100 9.4
50 18.8
30 31.3
10 94
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY
total dispersion with extra amplifier material..43/ This sys-
tem will support 20-fs pulses with little phase distortion.
2.5 Saturation Effects
The gain cross-section, sg , is not constant as a function
of wavelength. Since this appears as an exponent in
calculating the total gain, successive passes through
the amplification medium can lead to pulse spectral
narrowing and a shift in the central wavelength. This limits
the maximum bandwidth to 47 nm in Ti : sapphire..38/ As
the gain approaches saturation, the leading red edge of the
pulse extracts energy preferentially and the spectrum will
red shift. The maximum gain bandwidth can be achieved
by seeding to the blue of the peak, allowing the gain to
shift towards the maximum on successive passes. Second,
by altering the gain profile by discriminating against the
peak wavelengths using an étalon or a birefringent filter,
termed regenerative pulse shaping, the theoretical limit
can be overcome..44/
3 WAVELENGTH CONVERSION
Ultrafast lasers and amplifiers typically operate at a very
limited range of wavelengths. For example, Ti : sapphire-
based ultrafast lasers are tunable in the near-infrared
(NIR) region from about 700 to 1000 nm but typically
work best at about 800 nm. The high peak power of these
lasers can be used, however, to convert the laser light to
different wavelengths. In fact, in some cases ultrafast laser
systems may be the ideal or only route to make radiation
at certain wavelengths. Below, a series of techniques are
described to convert femtosecond laser pulses at visible
wavelengths to other wavelengths.
3.1 White-light Generation and the Optical Kerr Effect
At high intensities such as on the peak of an ultrashort
laser pulse, the refractive index of any medium becomes
a function of the incident intensity. This effect, which is
often referred to as the optical Kerr effect (OKE),.45/ can
be described by Equation (18):
n.I/ D n0 C n2 I C Ð Ð Ð .18/
where n0 is the normal refractive index of the medium
and n2 is the nonlinear refractive index. The nonlinear
refractive index is very small, for example, in fused
silica n2 ³ 3 ð 10 16 cm2 W 1 . A laser pulse with center
frequency w traveling through a medium of length L
will acquire an optical phase wLn/c and therefore the
effects of the nonlinear refractive index will become
important when this phase factor becomes comparable to
9
a wavelength. As an example, consider the propagation of
femtosecond pulses through an optical fiber. With a 9-µm
fiber-core diameter (typical for communications-grade
fiber), 10-nJ pulse energy and 100-fs pulse width, the
peak power is 100 kW, corresponding to a power density
of 1.5 ð 1011 W cm 2 . If the length of the fiber is 1 cm, the
optical pathlength changes by Ln2 I D 472 nm or half a
wavelength. From this calculation, it can be seen that the
OKE can have a significant effect on a femtosecond pulse
traveling through a medium. For pulses with energies
in the order of millijoules or higher, even the nonlinear
refractive index of air becomes important.
To understand how the OKE can modify the spectral
properties of an ultrashort pulse, one has to consider how
the nonlinear refractive index modifies the optical phase
of the pulse. The electric field of a laser pulse traveling in
the x direction can be written as Equation (19):
E.t/ cos.wt kx/ .19/
where k D wn/c is the wavenumber. Since the wavenum-
ber depends on the (nonlinear) refractive index of the
medium, the pulse will acquire a time-dependent phase
induced by the Kerr effect. Inserting Equation (18)
into Equation (19) and performing a Taylor expansion
around the peak of the ultrashort pulse, one finds
(Equation 20)
E.t/ cos[.w C xt/t kx] .20/
where x depends on the nonlinear refractive index, the
pulse width and peak power, and the distance traveled.
Consequently, the nonlinear refractive index induces
an approximately linear frequency sweep (or chirp, see
section 2.2 and Figure 12) on the pulse. In other words,
the spectrum of the pulse has broadened owing to the
nonlinear interaction. If a single pulse modifies its own
characteristics in this way, the effect is often referred
to as self-phase modulation. If one pulse modifies the
effective refractive index causing a second pulse to
change its characteristics, this is referred to as cross-phase
modulation.
The spectral broadening induced by the nonlinear
refractive index is extremely useful in spectroscopic
applications. For example, an 800-nm femtosecond pulse
can be sent through a short length of fiber or through a few
millimeters of glass or sapphire to produce a broadband
output pulse. Often there will be significant power at
wavelengths ranging from 400 nm to 1.6 µm. For this
reason, such spectrally broadened pulses are referred to as
white-light continuum pulses. The white-light continuum
generated in a fiber has been used to generate some of the
world’s shortest pulses of around 5 fs..46,47/ A white-light
continuum pulse is an ideal seed for an optical parametric
amplifier (see section 3.3).
10
1 3.2 Generation of Ultraviolet and X-rays
ω(t )
I(t )
−0
0 changes significantly as the UV region is approached. For
−2 0 2
(a) Time
(b)
Figure 12 (a) Chirp on an ultrashort pulse induced by the non-
linear refractive index of a dielectric medium. The input pulse
has a sech2 envelope and the figure shows the instantaneous fre-
quency within the pulse. A Taylor expansion around the peak of
the pulse shows that the frequency sweep is approximately linear
around time zero. (b) Photograph of a femtosecond white-light
continuum beam generated in a piece of sapphire. (Picture cour-
tesy of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science, University of
Michigan.)
An implication of the nonlinear refractive index is
self-focusing or defocusing. As a laser beam is typically
more intense in its center, the nonlinear change of the
refractive index will be strongest in the center. As a result,
the medium will act as an intensity-dependent lens. In a
set-up in which the sample is translated through the focus
of a beam, this effect can be used to measure the nonlinear
refractive index of a sample quickly. Self-focusing is the
basis of the Kerr lens mode locking (KLM) effect used
in ultrashort lasers (see section 2.1). Self-focusing can
become a run-away process leading to beam distortion
and catastrophic damage to optical components. In
white-light generation, self-focusing can result in the
beam breaking up into multiple filaments that make the
white-light output extremely unstable. It is therefore of
the utmost importance to choose the incident power such
that white light is generated without producing multiple
filaments. For a 100-fs pulse, this usually means that the
pulse energy should be limited to approximately 1 µJ.
GENERAL ARTICLES
The very high peak power that can be achieved with
femtosecond pulses means that in principle nonlin-
ear frequency conversion should be very efficient. It
should be straightforward to use second-harmonic gen-
eration (SHG), third-harmonic generation (THG) and
fourth-harmonic generation (FHG) to produce fem-
tosecond pulses in the near- to deep-ultraviolet (UV)
region. However, the group velocity of the pulses
(see section 2.2) depends on the center wavelength and
example, in a 1-mm b-barium borate (BBO) crystal (suit-
able for harmonic generation down to about 180 nm) the
difference in group delay between the fundamental and
the fourth harmonic is 3.3 ps (see Table 3). Depending
on the set-up, this implies that the conversion efficiency
is very low or the pulses produced are very long..48/
Therefore, when UV pulses are produced, it is extremely
important to use the thinnest possible nonlinear crystals.
As a rough guide, one should choose the thickness of
the crystal such that the group-delay difference between
the fundamental and the harmonic is about equal to or
less than the width of the pulse. An efficient harmonic-
generation set-up will also use multiple conversion steps
and between steps readjust the relative time delay
between the laser pulses at different wavelengths..49/
Most nonlinear crystals used for harmonic generation
[BBO, lithium triborate (LBO), potassium dihydrogen-
phosphate (KDP), etc.] are opaque in the deep-UV
region. Very high harmonic generation in low-pressure
gases has been used successfully to generate deep-UV and
soft X-ray pulses. It was recently shown.50/ that a glass
capillary could be used to modify the phasematching
condition for coherent soft X-ray generation. Using this
set-up, femtosecond pulses at 800 nm were converted to
the 17 – 32-nm wavelength range (¾30th harmonic) with
about 0.2 nJ energy per harmonic order. A similar set-up
was used.51/ to mix 800- and 400-nm pulses to produce 8-fs
pulses at 270 nm. Extremely short (5 fs) amplified laser
pulses have been used.52/ to generate X-rays (¾4 nm) in
the water window by harmonic generation in a gas jet.
Table 3 Group delays calculated
from the refractive index of BBO,
of femtosecond pulses at various
wavelengths traveling through a
1-mm crystal (ordinary polarization)
Wavelength tgroup tgroup
(nm) (ps) (ps)
800 5.62 –
400 5.94 0.32
267 6.74 1.12
200 8.97 3.34
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY
The advantage of very high harmonic generation is that
the X-rays are generated in a well-collimated beam. The
disadvantage is that it has not yet been shown to be pos-
sible to generate hard X-rays with wavelengths smaller
than a molecular bond length.
Electron impact sources could generate femtosecond
hard X-rays if high-charge, high-energy femtosecond
electron bunches were available. Even so, electron
impact sources have the disadvantage that the X-rays
are emitted in a 2p solid angle, which makes their
brightness typically very low. Therefore, these sources
are difficult to use in diffraction experiments although
not strictly impossible. Very high-power laser pulses
[peak powers of the order of 1 TW (1012 W)] can be
used to generate laser-produced plasmas..53/ Typically,
a high-power laser pulse is used to evaporate a (metal)
target and produce a plasma by stripping electrons off the
atoms with multiphoton ionization..54/ Recombination of
these electrons with the ions results in the emission of
hard X-ray pulses (wavelengths of the order of 1 Å).
Very recently, it has been shown that reverse Thompson
scattering of terawatt laser pulses off a high-energy
(50 MeV) electron beam can be used to produce hard
X-rays (0.4 Å)..55/ However, only 104 X-ray photons
were generated per laser shot, resulting in about one
diffracted X-ray photon per shot in diffraction off
Si h111i.
3.3 Optical Parametric Amplifier for Infrared
Generation
The infrared (IR) region of the spectrum is very important
for the sensing of a great variety of (transient) molecular
species. Femtosecond IR pulses can be used to determine
which bonds in a molecule break or form. The mid-
IR fingerprint region is ideally suited to determine the
presence of specific molecules in a sample. Therefore,
a great deal of effort has been invested over the last
decade to produce femtosecond pulses tunable in the
near- and mid-IR regions. Most techniques in use now
are based on parametric difference-frequency processes
(see Figure 13a and b)..56/ In difference-frequency mixing,
a strong femtosecond pulse at frequency w1 C w2 mixes
in a nonlinear crystal with a (weaker) pulse at frequency
w1 , to produce a new beam of femtosecond pulses at
frequency w2 . If the incident power at frequencies w1
and w2 is zero, a nonlinear crystal can produce these
frequencies spontaneously in a process referred to as
optical parametric generation (OPG). If the incident
power at frequencies w1 and w2 is small but nonzero,
the pump pulse at frequency w1 C w2 can amplify the
former frequencies in what is referred to as OPA. Since
the peak power of a femtosecond pulse can be extremely
high while the pulse energy is relatively low, one can
11
produce enormous parametric gain without destroying
the nonlinear crystal.
The frequencies or wavelengths that are produced in
OPG or OPA depend on the phasematching condition,
group velocity walk-off and the type of crystal used.
Figure 13(b) shows materials that are commonly used for
parametric generation in the IR region. BBO has a limited
tuning range in the IR range (approximately 1.2 – 2.8 µm
when pumped at 800 nm) but is very efficient owing to the
small group-velocity walk-off and high damage threshold.
KTP and its analogs rubidium titanyl phosphate and
cesium titanyl phosphate (RTA and CTA) are not as
efficient as BBO but allow the generation of femtosecond
pulses at wavelengths as long as 3 – 4 µm. There is a
variety of crystals suitable for generation of pulses in
the mid-IR region such as AgGaS2 and GaSe. However,
when these crystals are used to convert directly from
the visible to the mid-IR, they suffer from enormous
group velocity walk-off, (two-photon) absorption of the
pump and very poor efficiency. Therefore, generating
mid-IR pulses is typically performed in a two-stage
ω1
ω1 + ω2
ω2
(a)
GaSe
AgGaS2
Terahertz methods KTP
BBO
Frequency (cm−1)
10 100 1000 10 000
Translations Fundamental
vibrations
Librations Overtone
(b) vibrations
Figure 13 (a) Difference-frequency mixing. A strong fem-
tosecond pulse at frequency w1 C w2 can mix in a nonlinear
crystal with a (weaker) pulse at frequency w1 , to produce a
new beam of femtosecond pulses at frequency w2 . (b) Diagram
showing the various femtosecond IR tuning ranges that can
be obtained using an optical parametric amplification (OPA).
Using the common crystals BBO and potassium titanyl phos-
phate (KTP), tuning between 1 and 3 µm can be obtained. With
the more unusual crystals AgGaS2 , AgGaSe2 and GaSe, one
can obtain radiation to wavelengths as long as 20 µm.
12
process:.57/ an OPA generates two NIR frequencies
(e.g. 800 nm ! 1.5 µm C 1.7 µm, for example, in BBO)
followed by a difference frequency mixing stage (e.g.
1.5 – 1.7 µm ! 12 µm, for example, in AgGaS2 ).
All known materials suitable as a nonlinear difference-
frequency mixing crystal absorb strongly in the far-IR
region. GaSe and AgGaSe2 have the longest wavelength
cutoff of about 18 µm. In order to produce longer
wavelengths, different techniques have to be used (see
section 3.5). It has recently been shown that periodically
poled crystals such as periodically poled KTP.58/ can be
used with great success to generate femtosecond IR pulses
efficiently.
When femtosecond IR pulses are generated, they
inevitably have a very large bandwidth, e.g. about
100 cm 1 for a 100-fs pulse, which is clearly much larger
than the line width of a typical vibrational transition. This
does not mean that femtosecond IR pulses are useless
for vibrational spectroscopy – quite the contrary! The IR
pulse can be spectrally resolved after the sample. The
recent availability of IR diode arrays and IR charge-
coupled device (CCD) cameras means that an entire
IR spectrum can be taken in a single laser shot..57,59/
However, in time-resolved experiments, the broadband
IR pulse can excite multiple transitions at once and one
has to take account of this carefully in the theoretical
analysis of experiments..60/
3.4 Noncollinear Optical Parametric Amplification
Noncollinear optical parametric amplification (NOPA)
is a technique used to generate sub-20-fs tunable
visible and NIR pulses..61/ In a collinear geometry, the
temporal output of parametric generators and amplifiers
is restricted by group-velocity mismatch between the
pump and the generated signal and idler fields. In a
noncollinear arrangement, this effect can be overcome
since only the projection of the idler group velocity on to
the seed is important. By arranging the pump and seed
incidence angles with respect to the phase-matching angle
correctly, this group-velocity mismatch can be zeroed in
some nonlinear crystals. A seed pulse, which is a single
filament of white-light continuum generated in a 1-mm
thick piece of sapphire, is amplified by the frequency-
doubled output of a Ti : sapphire amplifier, in type I BBO
cut at 31° . The sapphire must be cut such that the optical
axis runs perpendicular to the cut face. Type I LBO is
used to generate the second harmonic of the Ti : sapphire
around 400 nm. The pump beam focused on to the BBO
generates a cone of parametric superfluorescence (inset
of Figure 14). When the angle of incidence at the crystal
is correct, there is no appreciable spatial divergence of
the superfluorescence. By directing the continuum seed
beam along the cone axis, a large spectral bandwidth from
GENERAL ARTICLES
Sapphire
BBO
10%
800 nm
90% 10 fs
LBO
Parametric super-
fluorescence
Pump
Variable
Signal
delay
Figure 14 Schematic diagram of a noncollinear OPA. The inset
shows the arrangement of the seed beam (the signal) relative to
the pump and the generated superfluorescence.
the white light can be simultaneously phase matched.
Adjustment of the relative delay between pump and
seed and some control of the chirp on the continuum
together change the center wavelength and bandwidth
of the amplified light. One great advantage of this
scheme is that relatively thick crystals can be employed
(typically 2 mm), which results in high single-pass gain.
The amplified output is then recompressed using a
prism pair (BK7 separated by ¾60 cm) yielding sub-20-fs
visible pulses continuously tunable from 480 to ¾700 nm.
Pulses as short as 5 fs have been generated.62/ using
a prism – double chirped mirror recompression scheme,
although the mirrors are unavailable commercially at the
time of writing. Pumping with only 10 µJ of blue light,
2 µJ can be generated at the signal wavelength. If higher
energy is available, a second amplification stage can be
added and 10 µJ can be obtained for a 75-µJ pump. Using
the same technique, extremely short NIR light can be
generated in type II phase-matched BBO pumped at the
Ti : sapphire fundamental.
3.5 Terahertz-pulse Generation and Detection
As described above, NIR and mid-IR pulses can be
generated using parametric down conversion. However,
down conversion cannot produce pulses with a wave-
length longer than about 18 µm. Long-wavelength pulses
can be generated (and detected) using so-called tera-
hertz techniques. There are effectively two methods for
generating subpicosecond terahertz (1012 Hz) pulses: pho-
toconduction or optical rectification. In photoconduction,
a laser pulse incident on an absorbing semiconductor
creates (real) charge carriers in the conduction band.
Acceleration of these carriers in an electrical bias field
gives rise to a transient photocurrent that radiates elec-
tromagnetic waves. In the far field the radiated electric
field is given by ER .t/ / dJS .t//dt, where JS .t/ is the time-
dependent surface current. This method is typically used
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY 13

the incident terahertz beam accelerates carriers created

VI

by another visible beam, resulting in a measurable pho-

t
S

pu
inp

ut
tocurrent. Since the visible beam has to be focused to

zo
ut

a very tight spot in this method, only unamplified ultra-

TH
fast lasers can be used. There is no overriding reason,
HV however, why one should use such closely spaced elec-
trodes. Large-aperture photoconducting antennas work
very well for the generation of terahertz pulses when
GaAs pumped by amplified pulses. The conversion efficiency
is about 0.1%. With low repetition rate (10 – 1000 Hz)
ultrafast laser systems, far-IR pulses with energies as high
as 1 µJ have been generated..65/
TH

An external bias field is not strictly necessary for photo-

zo
utp

conductive generation of terahertz pulses, as real carriers

ut

generated by a visible laser pulse can be accelerated in

(a) the field of the depletion layer of the semiconductor.
This surface field will accelerate the carriers perpendic-
0.8
ular to the surface of the semiconductor and hence the
|E(ω)| (arb. units)

0.6 terahertz oscillating dipole will be perpendicular to the

E(t ) (arb. units)

surface. Therefore, terahertz radiation generated through

0.4
0.2
0 20 40 60 80
0.0
Frequency (cm−1)
−0.2
−0.4
−2 −1 0 1 2 3
(b) Delay (ps)
Figure 15 (a) Schematic diagram illustrating the generation of
terahertz pulses. A visible femtosecond input pulse irradiates a
semiconductor antenna and creates conduction electrons. The
acceleration of these electrons in an external DC field results in
the emission of two beams of terahertz pulses. (b) A terahertz
pulse generated and detected in a 1-mm long ZnTe crystal cut
perpendicular to the h110i akis by a 150-fs pulse at 800 nm.
The inset shows the amplitude spectrum. The oscillations in the
pulse are due to the finite crystal thickness. (1 THz ³30 cm 1 ).
in conjunction with an antenna structure (see Figure 15a
and b), which allows an external bias field to be applied.
An antenna structure ideally suited to be used with low-
power mode-locked lasers was developed in the 1980s at
Bell Laboratories.63/ and IBM,.64/ and is now the most
common method for generating and detecting terahertz
pulses. In such a set-up, two metal electrodes are laid
down on a silicon or GaAs substrate, typically with a
separation of ¾100 µm. A beam of femtosecond laser
pulses is focused between the electrodes, in a spot with
a diameter of a few micrometers. On the generation
side, the metal electrodes are biased with a few tens of
volts and the excitation by the pump laser triggers the
emission of terahertz radiation. On the detection side,
this effect is only observed if the angle of incidence of
the exciting visible laser beam is nonzero. Typically, the
100
effect maximizes at the Brewster angle.
Optical rectification is distinct from photoconduction,
in that the visible exciting beam creates virtual rather than
real carriers. A more appropriate way to describe this is
that the second-order susceptibility, c.2/ , of the crystal is
used for difference-frequency mixing. Thus, the second-
4 order polarization can be written in the time domain as
Equation (21):
.2/
PTHz .t/ D e0 c.2/ EVIS .t/EŁVIS .t/ .21/
which shows that the electric field of the terahertz pulse
has the same shape as the intensity envelope of the
visible exciting pulse. In the last few years, it has been
discovered that optical rectification is an efficient method
for generating terahertz pulses if used appropriately.
Since a subpicosecond terahertz pulse has a spatial length
comparable to its center wavelength, it travels through
a material at its phase velocity. Therefore, for optimum
conversion from visible to far-IR wavelengths, one has
to match the group velocity of the visible pulse with the
phase velocity of the terahertz pulse..66,67/ This condition
is met in some zinc blende, large band-gap semiconductors
such as ZnTe and GaP when the exciting laser has a center
wavelength of ca. 800 nm.
The inverse of optical rectification is electrooptic
sampling: a terahertz pulse incident on an electrooptic
crystal such as ZnTe will induce a birefringence through
the Pockels effect. An ultrafast visible probe pulse with
a variable delay copropagating through the same crystal
will experience a retardation that can be retrieved with
balanced detection. Scanning the relative time delay of
14
the probe pulse, one can record a time-domain trace
of the electric field of the terahertz pulse. Using this
method, signal-to-noise ratios, defined as the ratio of the
terahertz pulse peak to the noise background, as high
as 107 have been reported..68/ However, the signal-to-
noise ratio with which one can measure the peak of
the terahertz pulse is typically of the order of 102 – 103
in 100 ms. An exciting new variation on this technique
is the use of a chirped probe pulse..69/ A femtosecond
pulse at 800 nm can be stretched and chirped to tens of
picoseconds using a grating pair. If this chirped pulse is
used in the electrooptic sampling process, there will be a
relationship between wavelength and relative time delay.
Thus, detection of this probe pulse with a spectrometer
and diode-array detector allows one to measure the entire
terahertz pulse shape in a single laser shot.
As rectification and electrooptic sampling are nonres-
onant effects, the minimum duration of the terahertz
pulses that can be generated or detected is limited only
by the thickness of the crystal scaled with the difference
in phase and group velocity. Thus, with ca. 10 – 15-fs excit-
ing pulses at 800 nm, it was shown that terahertz pulses
could be generated with detectable frequencies as high
as 70 THz..70/ At these large bandwidths, it is unavoid-
able that the t-ray spectrum will overlap with a photon
absorption band in the generating and detecting crystals,
leading to large oscillations in the terahertz field trailing
the main peak.
The current record highest detectable frequency for
a terahertz pulse is ¾70 THz, but there is no reason to
believe that this could not be improved upon. Using
the simple time – bandwidth relation, nt D 0.32, it
follows that with the shortest visible pulses achievable,
ca. 4 – 5 fs, usable power at frequencies from 0 to 160 THz
(l D 1.8 µm) could be achieved. As femtosecond lasers
continue to shrink in size, it may be expected that
ultrafast terahertz devices may well take over from
Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometers as
general-purpose IR spectrometers. As an entire terahertz
time-domain trace can be acquired in a single shot,.69/
these devices would combine the reliability and accuracy
of FTIR spectrometry with real-time speeds. The most
significant aspect of ultrafast terahertz pulses, however,
is that they are synchronized with visible or UV pulses,
allowing time-domain spectroscopy.
3.6 Femtosecond Electron Pulses
Very short (picosecond to femtosecond) electron pulses
are useful for a variety of applications. For example,
picosecond electron pulses have been used as a
probe pulse for determining the time-dependent struc-
ture of molecules undergoing chemical reactions (see
section 5.3). However, such pulses might also be used
GENERAL ARTICLES
as a seed for electron accelerators or for the genera-
tion of femtosecond X-ray pulses. Current technology for
generating femtosecond electron pulses is based on exper-
iments done in the past with picosecond and nanosecond
laser pulses..71 – 73/ A UV laser beam is used to irradiate a
metal target. If the photon energy is higher than the work
function of the metal (typically 4 – 5 eV for common tran-
sition metals such as gold, silver or tungsten), electrons
are ejected into the vacuum through the photoelec-
tric effect. These emitted electrons are electrostatically
extracted and accelerated into a narrow beam. In recent
experiments (see section 5.3), this technique has been
brought into the subpicosecond domain. The main prob-
lem in maintaining the time resolution is the space-charge
effect: nonrelativistic electrons repel each other through
Coulomb repulsion. It is therefore of the greatest impor-
tance to accelerate the electrons as quickly as possible
and to keep the number of electrons per pulse as low as
possible. Thus, it was seen in an experiment.74/ that for a
100-µm laser spot size on the photocathode, the electron
pulse would broaden to about 15 ps when there were
1000 electrons in the pulse. When the number of elec-
trons per pulse was reduced to 100, the pulse width was
less than 1 ps. There is no fundamental reason why one
could not work with ten or even one electron per pulse
and therefore it should be possible to achieve electron-
pulse durations in the order of tens of femtoseconds. Of
course, to achieve a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio in an
experiment, the pulse repetition rate should be high. Such
pulses will be of great value in time-dependent molecular
structure determination.
4 TIME-RESOLVED EXPERIMENTS
Most electronic devices cannot measure transients much
faster than about 1 ns. Although there are specialized
electronic devices such as streak cameras that may be able
to resolve picosecond or even hundreds of femtosecond
transients in real time, in most cases it makes more
sense to look for alternative detection techniques. The
techniques that are used most frequently are based on
auto- or cross-correlation of two beams of femtosecond
pulses (see Figure 16a). If the sample is a nonlinear crystal
used for sum-frequency generation, this technique can be
used to determine the shape and relative arrival time
of two short pulses. If the sample contains molecules or
atoms that resonantly absorb the incident radiation, the
experiment is a pump – probe experiment.
4.1 Auto- and Cross-correlation
In an autocorrelator, an incoming beam of pulses is split
in two. One beam travels through an optical path with
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY 15

two-photon absorption in a photodiode may be used

Fixed delay to provide the required second-order response..75/ The
averaged measured auto- or cross-correlation signal then
has the form (Equation 22)
Z
 2
Compensation plate
Input (ω1)
Variable delay
Beamsplitter
SHG Crystal
Detector
(a)
8 time delay is proportional to the shape of the incoming
6 signal as a function of delay has itself a Gaussian shape.
Icross-if
4 envelope of the pulse by multiplying by 0.71. The value
2 practice, it may be wise to use nonlinear curve fitting to
0
−60 −40 −20 0 20 40
(b) τ (fs)
Figure 16 (a) Schematic diagram illustrating the layout of an
autocorrelator. Two laser beams of femtosecond pulses at
frequency w1 are overlapped in a nonlinear crystal such as
BBO. The sum-frequency signal at frequency 2w1 as a function
of relative time delay is proportional to the shape of the pulse.
(b) Interferometric autocorrelation of a 25-fs fwhm laser pulse
at 800 nm.
a fixed length, the other through a path that includes
an optical delay line. An optical delay line consists
simply of a pair of mirrors or a retro-reflector mounted
on a motorized translation stage or a sine-wave-driven
loudspeaker. In such a set-up, the spatial position of the
mirrors on the translation stage is related directly to the
relative time delay between the two beams of pulses.
For example, if the optical delay line is translated by
L D 1 µm, this corresponds to a change in relative time
delay of t D 2L/c ³ 6.6 fs. Both beams are focused in
a nonlinear crystal such as BBO or KDP in order to
produce second-harmonic radiation. Phase matching.56/
in the crystal is used to produce a beam at the second-
Icross .t/ / c.2/ 
Iw1 .t/Iw2 .t t/ dt .22/
where c.2/ is the second-order susceptibility of the
nonlinear crystal and t is the relative delay time t1 t2
between the two pulses. Of course, the cross-correlation
signal consists itself of a train of femtosecond pulses
but since one is only interested in the average signal as
a function of the relative time delay, no fast detector
is required. Since the nonlinear crystal is chosen such
that it does not exhibit any time-dependent processes
of its own, the cross-correlation signal as a function of
pulses. For example, in the case of an autocorrelation
of a pulse with a Gaussian envelope, the autocorrelation
In this example, one can measure the fwhm of the
autocorrelation signal and find the width of the intensity
of the conversion factor depends on the pulse shape and
a list of conversion factors can be found in Table 4. In
determine the pulse shape and corresponding conversion
factor.
60 Clearly, the auto- or cross-correlation signal contains
limited information about the pulse shape. For example,
an asymmetric pulse shape will go undetected in an auto-
correlation. More serious is that an autocorrelation will
provide almost no information about possible chirp on
the pulse (see section 2.2). If the pulse is chirped, the
autocorrelation will be broader than might be expected
from the pulse spectrum. Table 4 has a column with
time – bandwidth products, that is, the product of the
fwhm of the intensity envelope of the pulse in the time
domain and the frequency domain. However, checking
that the time – bandwidth product is close to that expected
for a given pulse shape is not a very good method of
making sure that the pulse is chirp free.
A better method for detecting chirp is the measurement
of an interferometric autocorrelation and is taken by
overlapping the two input beams. The correlation signal
is now much more complicated.77/ and oscillates at
frequencies corresponding to the laser fundamental and
second harmonic. Since the second-harmonic intensity is
proportional to the square of the incident intensity, the
detected second-harmonic intensity as a function of delay
is (Equation 23)
Z
harmonic frequency in which one photon has been taken 1 T/2  2
I2w .t/ D [E.t/ C E.t t/]2  dt .23/
from one beam and one from the other. Alternatively, T T/2
16 GENERAL ARTICLES

Table 4 Second-order autocorrelation functions and time – bandwidth products for various pulse-shape models,.76/ where
tp D pulse width (fwhm), tG D autocorrelation width (fwhm) and n D spectral width (fwhm)

I.t/ (x  t/T) ntp tp /T G20 .t/ (y  t/T) tG /T tp /tG

x2
p y2 /2
p
Gaussian I.t/ D e 0.4413 2 ln 2 e 2 2 ln 2 0.7071
2  
sin x 3 sin 2y
Diffraction function I.t/ D 0.8859 2.7831 1 3.7055 0.7511
x2 2y2 2y
3.y coth y 1/
Hyperbolic sech I.t/ D sech2 x 0.3148 1.7627 2.7196 0.6482
sinh2 y
1 1
Lorentzian I.t/ D 0.2206 2 4 0.5000
1 C x2 1 C .y/2/2
n
One-sided exponential I.t/ D e x ^t½0 0.1103 ln 2 e jyj
2 ln 2 0.5000
0 ^t<0
Symmetric two-sided exponential I.t/ D e 2jxj 0.1420 ln 2 .1 C 2jyj/e 2jyj
1.6783 0.4130

where T is the measurement time, and T × t. Fig- t1

ure 16(b) shows an experimental interferometric auto-
correlation trace of a 25-fs 800-nm pulse. If the pulse
is bandwidth limited, the interferometric autocorrelation
signal yields a ratio between peak and background of
8 : 1. Linear chirp (caused by GDD) is clearly visible
as the peak-to-background ratio is much less than 8 : 1
in that case. Nonlinear chirp (caused, for example, by
residual TOD) is clearly visible as a ‘‘pedestal’’ on the
interferometric autocorrelation.
Another useful technique for characterizing femtosec-
ond pulses is called frequency-resolved optical gating
(FROG).78/ with which both the intensity and phase of a
femtosecond pulse can be determined. The critical feature
of FROG is that it measures the (second- or third-order)
autocorrelation as a function of both time delay and fre-
quency (see Figure 17). As before, a beam of femtosecond
pulses is split in two and recombined on a nonlinear crys-
tal. In this case, the two beams are focused on to the
nonlinear crystal using a cylindrical lens. As a result,
different positions on the crystal correspond to different
relative delay times. If the crystal produces the second
harmonic of the incident beams, the emergent beam will
have the autocorrelation trace spatially encoded on to
it. If the signal beam is sent through a spectrometer, a
two-dimensional detector such as a CCD camera can be
used to measure a signal that depends on delay in one
direction and frequency in the other. Various nonlineari-
Delay
To
t2 spectrometer
Nonlinear
Cylindrical crystal
lens
Figure 17 Experimental arrangement for single-shot FROG.
Two beams of femtosecond pulses are focused with a cylindrical
lens on to a nonlinear crystal, e.g. one that generates the
second-harmonic of the input beam. Because of the focusing
geometry, the position on the nonlinear crystal corresponds
directly with time delay. This allows one to measure the
correlation trace as a function of both time and frequency.
the delay t varies along the slit, whereas the frequency
w varies in a direction perpendicular to this. For such
an arrangement, the resulting signal-pulse electric field is
given by Equation (24):
Esig .t, t/ / c.3/ E.t/jE.t t/j2 .24/
where c.3/ is the third-order susceptibility of the sample
(i.e. the strength of the OKE). The FROG trace can be
considered a ‘‘spectrogram’’ of the field E(t) as the signal
intensity is given by Equation (25):
Z 1 2
ties can be used with the FROG technique, such as SHG  
and self-diffraction (effectively the OKE in a piece of
glass; see section 3.1).
In the polarization-gate arrangement of self-diffrac-
tion,.79/ the probe pulse E(t) passes through crossed
polarizers and is gated at the nonlinear medium by the
gate pulse E.t t/, which has a 45° relative polarization.
A cylindrical lens focuses each beam to a line in the sample
(e.g. a piece of glass) so that the delay varies spatially
across the sample. Consequently, at the spectrometer,
IFROG .w, t/ ³  E.t/g.t t/e iwt dt .25/
1
where the variable-delay gate function g.t t/ is equal to
jE.t t/j2 . This quantity can be thought of as a gate that
chooses a slice of the time-varying signal pulse.
At each delay, the signal consists of different frequency
components, so the gate function builds up a spectrum
of the pulse for every value of t. For a transform-limited
pulse, it is expected that only frequencies within the
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY
bandwidth of that pulse would be resolved and that
the instantaneous frequency remains the same at each
point in time. However, for a chirped pulse, where lower
frequencies lead higher ones or vice versa, the frequency-
resolved trace will be considerably different, since the
instantaneous frequency is a function of time. Since the
phase of the signal pulse is contributed only by E(t)
[E.t t/ appears as the square, so all phase information
is lost], the phase can be retrieved from a FROG trace.
This is achieved using an iterative Fourier-transform
algorithm.
Ultrashort pulse characterization techniques generally
require instantaneously responding media. The polariza-
tion gate geometry FROG technique uses the electronic
Kerr effect, which is accompanied, however, by a Raman-
ringing effect. The slower nuclear motion of the material
must therefore be considered in the iterative algorithm
used to retrieve the pulse phase and intensity. The pulse-
retrieval algorithm can be modified.80/ by including terms
due to the slow response of the medium in the signal-
field equation. Such problems with a slow response of the
correlating medium can be avoided by using two-photon
absorption in a diode..75/
4.2 Pump – Probe Techniques
Most ultrafast spectroscopy experiments use the pump –
probe technique, which is very similar to the cross-
correlation technique described above. In pump– probe
spectroscopy the pump beam is typically much stronger
than the probe beam, the two beams have a different
center wavelength (or the probe may not even be a laser
beam), and the sample tends to be more interesting.
As in the cross-correlation technique, the femtosecond
time resolution is obtained by sending one of the beams
through a motor-driven optical delay line. The (relatively)
strong pump beam initiates some process of interest, e.g.
a chemical reaction. The probe beam, entering the sample
later, will be amplified, attenuated or refracted because
of the changes taking place in the sample. There are so
many variations of this scheme and literally thousands of
experimental examples that it would be pointless to list
them all. Therefore, two examples of the pump– probe
technique will be described in some detail here to convey
the general idea.
Figure 18 shows a very typical pump– probe spec-
troscopy set-up. A relatively strong pump beam is sent
through a (motorized) optical delay line and focused into
the sample where it initiates some chemical reaction. In
many cases, the pump beam will be modified, e.g. by dou-
bling or tripling its frequency through SHG or THG. A
(small) fraction of the pump beam is split off by an opti-
cal beamsplitter and converted to another wavelength.
In this example, a white-light continuum is generated as
17
DL1
D
Pump
SP
Probe
S
WL
DL2
Figure 18 ‘‘Classical’’ pump – probe spectroscopy set-up. A
relatively strong pump beam is sent through an optical delay line
(DL1) and focused into the sample (S). A small fraction of the
pump beam is split off and converted to another wavelength. In
this example, a white-light continuum is generated as a probe,
which is sent through another optical delay line (DL2) and into
the sample. After the sample, the white-light probe is spectrally
resolved by a spectrometer (SP) before being detected by a
‘‘slow’’ detector (D).
a probe but one could also use other conversion tech-
niques to make probes at widely varying wavelengths.
In any event, the probe pulse is sent through another
optical delay line and focused into the sample. One may
temporarily replace the sample by a nonlinear crystal to
determine at which setting of the optical delay lines the
pulses overlap in the sample. In Figure 18, the white-
light probe is spectrally resolved by a spectrometer after
the sample in order to measure the transient transmission
spectrum of the sample. The signal measured as a function
of the pump – probe delay time reflects the creation and
destruction of chemical species in the sample. However,
on short timescales (¾<1 ps), there are numerous phe-
nomena such as cross-phase modulation (see section 3.1)
that may complicate the signal..45,60/ A variation on the
pump – probe technique is the photon echo..56/ Photon
echoes may be used to remove inhomogeneous broad-
ening from an absorption spectrum and can therefore be
very useful in analyzing complex samples.
In the above example of the pump – probe technique,
both the pump and probe were laser pulses. However,
lasers can also be used to make pump and probe pulses
of an entirely different kind. Figure 19 shows an example
where femtosecond laser pulses are used to generate
and gate voltage pulses..81 – 84/ A short laser pulse can
be used to create carriers in the conduction band of a
semiconductor and thereby create a femtosecond voltage
pulse that can be sent down a transmission line deposited
on to the sample. The voltage pulse can be picked
up, for example, by a STM tip. If the current flowing
through the STM tip is gated by a second laser pulse,
the averaged tunnel current can be measured as a
function of pump – probe delay in addition to the spatial
position of the tip. Therefore, this type of pump– probe
technique provides both very high temporal resolution
18
Probe
Scanning
Pump tunneling
microscopy
Figure 19 Unconventional pump – probe technique. In this
example, the pump beam excites electrons in the conduction
band of a semiconductor, thereby creating a femtosecond
voltage pulse in the metal transmission line deposited on
top of the semiconductor sample. The voltage pulse can be
measured by an scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) tip. If
the current flowing through the STM cantilever is itself gated
by a probe pulse, time- and space-resolved measurements can
be performed.
and spatial resolution. There are many other examples of
unconventional pump– probe techniques. The probe may
consist of X-ray pulses, electron pulses or any other kind
of pulsed particle beam. The only critical requirement is
that the pulses in the pump beam are synchronized to
those in the probe beam.
5 APPLICATIONS
As ultrafast lasers are becoming smaller and easier to use,
they will find increasingly down-to-earth applications. For
example, IR generation using ultrafast lasers may become
so simple and cheap that its advantages can be used: spa-
tially coherent beams (resulting in better focusing and
directionality), coherent detection (allowing one to mea-
sure refractive indices directly without resorting to the
Kramers – Kronig relations), broadband (allowing single-
shot detection of an entire spectrum) and more power at
‘‘odd’’ wavelengths (especially in the far-IR region). One
of the main advantages of ultrafast lasers is, of course, that
they allow time-resolved experiments with which one can
observe transient species. Another advantage is that short
pulses with modest energy can have huge peak power.
This makes femtosecond pulses very suitable for laser
ablation of materials, multiphoton absorption (for imag-
ing of biological materials), fragmentation (e.g. of DNA
into fragments that may be analyzed using MS), etc. The
high peak power also permits the efficient conversion
to other wavelengths using nonlinear crystals. A slightly
unexpected recent observation is that when femtosecond
lasers are used for machining the resulting cuts are much
cleaner because the laser pulses turn the material into a
plasma rather than melting it. The number of applications
GENERAL ARTICLES
of ultrafast lasers is already large and will only grow. It
would be impossible to describe all these applications in
the limited space available here. Therefore, a few key
applications will be described.
5.1 The Study of Fast Chemical Reactions
In principle, there is no difference in the information
that can be obtained from a frequency-resolved or
a time-resolved experiment. In a frequency-resolved
spectrum, a vibronic transition may show up as a series of
sharp absorption lines. In the equivalent time-resolved
experiment, one will observe quantum beats whose
periods correspond to the inverse of the spacings between
the absorption lines. In practice, however, there may be
differences. For example, even in the gas phase, the
spacing between the absorption lines may be so small
that it is hard to resolve them. More importantly, in the
solution phase, the molecule under study will couple
to the degrees of freedom of the surrounding bath.
Strictly, the Schrödinger equation for the liquid could be
solved, which would show that the dynamics in the liquid
in fact correspond to about one-trillion-trillion (1024 )
well-defined quantum states. Most of these bath states
will be coupled to the vibronic states in the molecule,
resulting in the broadening of the transition. In such
a case, a spectrally resolved experiment will provide
little information about the dynamics of the molecule
or the dynamics of a chemical reaction that one would
like to study. Even hole-burning spectroscopy will not
provide much more information in most cases. Only
time-resolved pump – probe techniques can elucidate the
molecular dynamics.
In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of experiments were
performed by a variety of groups which came to be
known as ‘‘femtochemistry’’ or ‘‘femtobiology’’. These
experiments exploited the property that if a molecule
is excited with a laser pulse shorter than the oscillation
period of relevant vibrations in the molecule, a coherent
vibrational wavepacket is created in the excited state (see
Figure 20a and b). Vibrations with a period shorter than
the pulse width are simply not coherently excited and do
not give rise to quantum beats.
The ‘‘hydrogen atom’’ of femtochemistry is the
diatomic molecule NaI that was extensively studied in
the gas phase..13/ When NaI is excited by a femtosecond
UV pulse (see Figure 21a and b), a wavepacket is created
on the repulsive excited state, which (at large interatomic
distances) corresponds to the ion pair NaC and I . How-
ever, this repulsive potential forms an avoided crossing
with the ground-state potential, which (at large inter-
atomic distances) corresponds to the radical pair Na C I.
If the system is probed in the excited-state potential
well, it is seen that the wavepacket coherently oscillates
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY
(a)
0
N A
−20 + 4
H2N S NH2
∆OD (mOD)
−40
−60
−80
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
(b) Delay (ps)
Figure 20 (a) Schematic diagram of a vibronic transition
excited by a pulse whose width is smaller than the vibrational
period. The pulse creates a coherent vibrational wavepacket in
the excited electronic state that will oscillate in the excited-state
potential well. (b) Time-resolved 600-nm pump, 700-nm probe
signals in the dye molecule thionine studied with 42-fs time
resolution. The signal is stimulated emission from the excited
electronic state and the oscillations correspond to a vibrational
mode at 443 cm 1 in the excited-state potential well.
in the bound state. However, if the sodium radical is
probed by inducing fluorescence with the probe pulse, it
is seen that the population of the radical increases in a
stepwise fashion. Therefore, such an experiment shows
that the chemical reaction (a dissociation in this case)
is a quantum-mechanical process in which a fraction of
the bound wavepacket tunnels to the state of dissoci-
ated radicals each time the wavepacket travels through
the crossing region. Interestingly, it is possible to use
quantum mechanical interference of wavepackets to steer
a reaction in a desired direction and away from undesired
directions. This is referred to as coherent control and has
been applied on small molecules with varied success..85/
A study, such as that on NaI described above, becomes
interesting if one can compare the behavior in the gas
19
(AB)**
(AB)*
Fluorescence
fs-probe
A+ + B−
fs-pump
A+B
AB
(a)
6
B
Signal
2
C
0
−2 0 2 4 6 8
(b) Time delay (pico secs)
Figure 21 (a) Simple diagram depicting a typical coherent
dissociation reaction. The pump pulse excites a small molecule
to its first excited state. If the pump pulse is shorter than
the vibrational period, it may create a coherent wavepacket
that will oscillate in the excited-state potential well. In this
diagram, the molecule splits into two fragments consisting of
either two radicals or two ions. A probe pulse excites the
molecule to a third state, from which it fluoresces back to the
ground state. The total fluorescence is measured as a function
of pump – probe delay. (b) Pump – probe results.86/ from NaI
with lpump D 310 nm. (A) lprobe D 580 nm; (b) lprobe D 589 nm
(on resonance); and (C) lprobe D 612 nm. (Reproduced from
Rosker et al..86/ by permission of Elsevier Science.  Elsevier
Science BV, 1988.)
phase with that in the condensed phase..87/ Various
molecules that had been studied in the gas phase have
now been studied in solution where again one could
observe quantum beats due to vibrational wavepackets.
Examples are HgI2 .88/ and I2 ..89,90/ Vibrational quantum
beats have now been observed in a large variety of
molecules in the condensed phase, including proteins..91/
In these large, complicated systems, quantum beats
provide a unique opportunity to determine the potentials
relevant for chemical and biological reactions. Not least,
the femtochemistry technique may be used to detect
20 GENERAL ARTICLES

short-lived intermediates that would be invisible when

ordinary spectrally resolved techniques were used. A
recent experiment.1/ has shown that femtochemistry can
be combined with MS: pump and probe laser beams were
crossed with a molecular beam and radical fragments
were detected with MS as a function of pump – probe
delay. The technique was used to study Diels – Alder
reactions and the concept of concertedness and may
well find more general use in analytical chemistry. Now
that high-repetition rate, high-power lasers are available,
ultrafast lasers may be used to make a variety of elusive
molecules that normally occur only in the atmosphere or
in space.

5.2 Imaging
Nonlinear ultrafast optics can be of immense value for (a)
(biological) imaging studies. Femtosecond lasers can
be used to perform multiphoton absorption confocal-
imaging studies. Using this technique, one can image the
spatial distribution of one specific molecule inside a living 150
cell..92/ Tunable femtosecond NIR pulses are ideal for
this purpose as scattering and damage to the cell are 200 21
Delay (fs)

reduced compared with UV radiation. A new alternative 20 17

19 16
involving THG at the focus of a microscope has been 250 15
m)
18 14
used recently in imaging applications..93/ At an interface, 13
m

17
12
m)
x(

giving rise to a slight change in refractive index or 300 16 11

third-order nonlinear susceptibility, THG becomes phase
matched..94/ The UV light generated can be detected
using a photomultiplier tube or CCD camera. The
conversion efficiency is low (10 8 ), but at the tight focus
of a high numerical-aperture objective lens, a fluence
of 100 – 300 GW cm 2 (a few nanojoules per pulse) is
enough to generate a detectable third-harmonic signal
without damage to the sample. The technique benefits
from being background free. NIR light at 1.2 µm has been
employed,.95/ giving a third-harmonic signal at 400 nm
away from potentially harmful UV wavelengths, which
would damage delicate (possibly living) specimens. The
chirp induced by the lens is also much smaller in the NIR
region. In distinct contrast to multiphoton absorption
of samples tagged with fluorescent probes, no reduction
in signal is observed over time since the sample is not
repeatedly bleached. Scanning mirrors are used to provide
traveling Lissajou patterns giving a nearly uniform sample
illumination and the image is recorded on a CCD camera.
An example image.95/ is shown in Figure 22(a). Here, a
rhizoid (a tubular single cell) tip from chara plants (green
algae) is shown. The bright spots are stratoliths, vesicles
containing BaSO4 crystals, which flow within the cell and
are necessary for the gravitational response of the alga.
The CCD camera detects the motion of these stratoliths
over time. This example shows that the technique is
applicable to the same systems as more conventional
15
9
10 y (m
350 14 8
(b)
Figure 22 (a) THG image.95/ at root tip showing motion of stra-
toliths. The image is approximately 75 ð 75 µm2 . (Reproduced
from J.A. Squier, M. Muller, G.J. Brakenhoff, K.R. Wilson,
Opt. Express, 3(9), 315 – 324 (1998), by permission of the Optical
Society of America, 1998.) (b) THz image of a bonsai leaf taken
by plotting the transmission time as a function of position..99/
phase-contrast microscopy and will surely be developed
further as techniques for optimizing the duration of the
pulse at the objective are developed..96 – 98/
The frequency range between ca. 100 GHz and a few
terahertz has not been studied very well, as not many
light sources are available. FTIR spectrometers typically
peter out at frequencies below about 50 cm 1 (1.5 THz),
even when equipped with bolometric detectors and far-
IR optics. Microwave devices may go to frequencies
as high as 1 THz but usually have poor tunability.
However, this frequency range is of great interest as many
low-frequency vibrational and rotational modes absorb
here. The pseudo-band gaps of superconductors and inter-
band gaps of semiconductor heterostructures are also in
this range. An exiting new application of terahertz pulses
is t-ray imaging. T-ray imaging was first performed at
Bell Laboratories:.100,101/ a beam of terahertz pulses was
focused to a tight spot and a sample was scanned through
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY
the beam. Owing to the long wavelengths at ca. 1 THz,
spatial resolution was limited to about 1 mm. However,
because the transit time of subpicosecond terahertz pulses
can be measured with an accuracy of a few femtoseconds
(see Figure 22b), it is possible to make tomographic
images..100/ Thus, by measuring the internal reflections
in a sample, for example, the various surfaces in a
floppy disk, it is possible to detect hidden features with a
depth resolution much higher than the wavelength. Very
recently, several attempts have been made to improve
the lateral resolution by applying near-field techniques
such as using small apertures in front of the sample.102/ or
terahertz pulse generation in subwavelength regions..99/
It was shown recently.103/ that electrooptic sampling can
be performed in parallel using a large-area electrooptic
crystal and an unfocused probe beam, thus allowing the
acquisition of t-ray images in real time.
Using a technique analogous to ultrasound, optical-
coherence tomography utilizing femtosecond lasers has
permitted micrometer resolution in real-time imag-
ing applications, particularly in biomedicine..104/ Cross-
sectional images are made in a similar manner to the
terahertz-imaging application by measuring the ‘‘echo’’
time of backscattered light using interferometric meth-
ods. Since the axial resolution is limited by the coherence
length of the light, short-pulse Ti : sapphire and partic-
ularly NIR Cr : forsterite lasers are seen as attractive
sources. An image is measured by building up the
backscattered pattern at several transverse positions and
these high average-power lasers are ideal for imaging at
a few frames per second.
5.3 Structure Determination: Electron Beams and
X-rays
Time-resolved pump– probe spectroscopy has been used
for a long time to study chemical reactions. Often such
spectroscopy relies on excitation and probing at visible
wavelengths and transient visible spectra have to be
carefully analyzed and interpreted to find out what the
reaction products are. More recently, several groups have
started to use femtosecond IR pulses in the hope that
transient IR spectra will give more direct information
about which chemical bonds are broken or formed.
However, neither visible nor IR spectroscopy provides
direct information about the spatial atomic structure of a
given reaction intermediate.
X-ray diffraction has been used for close on a
century to determine the atomic structure of crystals.
Especially in the life sciences this has resulted in a much
better understanding of the structure of proteins and
other biomolecules and hence to a better understanding
of the fundamentals of biochemistry. Because of the
great absorption of electrons by materials, time-resolved
21
electron-diffraction experiments have so far only been
performed in the gas phase and on surfaces. However,
as steady-state electron diffraction has also been used to
determine the structure of proteins in the solid state,.105/
femtosecond time-resolved electron diffraction in the
solid state may also become a possibility. Electrons
at present provide the most structural information
for a given amount of radiation damage..106/ The
atomic cross-section of carbon for (elastic or inelastic)
scattering of electrons is more than six orders of
magnitude larger than that of X-rays. Furthermore,
radiation damage by 80 – 500-keV (l D 0.043 – 0.017 Å)
electrons is 400 – 1000 times less than that of l D 1.5 Å
X-rays..106/ Clearly, it would be a great advantage if
one could apply the technique of diffraction on a
femtosecond timescale. Modern synchrotron facilities
such as the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
(ESRF) in Grenoble, France, and the Advanced Light
Source (ALS) in Berkeley, CA, USA, now make it
possible to study structural dynamics using time-resolved
X-ray crystallography on a nanosecond timescale..107,108/
However, many chemical and biological reactions take
place on a picosecond or even femtosecond timescale.
Many research groups around the world are now
working towards the goal of femtosecond timescale
diffraction. The technology of generating femtosecond
X-ray or electron pulses is described in sections 3.2
and 3.6.
A series of (sub)picosecond time-resolved electron-
diffraction experiments was recently performed on
gas phase samples in a molecular beam (Figure 23a
and b)..109,110/ In these experiments, electron pulses were
generated by exciting a back-illuminated photocathode
with 400-fs 307-nm laser pulses at a 30-Hz repetition
rate. The electron pulses (¾6000 electrons) were then
accelerated to 18.8 keV and focused with the 307-nm
pump beam into a gas jet containing the sample. Two-
dimensional electron diffraction patterns were recorded
as a function of pump – probe delay using a CCD camera
fiber-coupled to an image intensifier. The time resolu-
tion (determined by space – charge effects) was about
7 ps. In these experiments, dissociation reactions in, for
example, CF2 I2 and Fe(CO)5 were studied. The method
allowed the observation of rare reaction intermediates
and, most importantly, the determination of their spatial
structure. Picosecond time-resolved electron diffraction
experiments have also been performed on surfaces. For
example, the effect of melting a Pb (110) surface has been
studied..72/
Generating femtosecond hard X-ray pulses is much
more difficult than generating electron pulses, which may
explain the small number of unique experiments..53/ All
ultrafast X-ray diffraction experiments to date.53,111/ have
studied the lattice expansion of semiconductors, metals
22 GENERAL ARTICLES

Electron gun ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

BBO b-Barium Borate

CCD Charge-coupled Device
s CCD
CPA Chirped-pulse Amplification
CPM Colliding-pulse Mode-locked
CTA Cesium Titanyl Phosphate
MCP
CW Continuous Wave
Pump FHG Fourth-harmonic Generation
(a) Electron generation FOD Fourth-order Dispersion
FR Faraday Rotator
FROG Frequency-resolved Optical Gating
FTIR Fourier Transform Infrared
fwhm Full Width at Half-maximum
GDD Group Delay Dispersion
GVD Group Velocity Dispersion
IR Infrared
KDP Potassium Dihydrogenphosphate
KLM Kerr Lens Mode Locking
KTP Potassium Titanyl Phosphate
LBO Lithium Triborate
MCP Multichannel Array Plate
(b) MS Mass Spectrometry
NIR Near-infrared
Figure 23 (a) Schematic diagram of a time-resolved elec- NOPA Noncollinear Optical Parametric
tron-diffraction experiment. A strong femtosecond laser pulse Amplification
irradiates a metal target and produces femtosecond electron
OKE Optical Kerr Effect
pulses. The electrons are accelerated by an electron gun and
focused into a sample. Diffracted electrons are detected by OPA Optical Parametric Amplification
an imaging multichannel array plate (MCP) and CCD detec- OPG Optical Parametric Generation
tor. If the sample is pumped by another beam of femtosecond PC Pockels Cell
pulses, one can detect the change in the diffraction pattern RTA Rubidium Titanyl Phosphate
induced by the pump. (b) Femtosecond electron-diffraction
SHG Second-harmonic Generation
pattern..74,109,110/ Picture courtesy of the California Institute
of Technology. STM Scanning Tunneling Microscopy
TFP Thin-film Polarizing Beamsplitter
THG Third-harmonic Generation
or organic films under intense laser irradiation. In such an
TOD Third-order Dispersion
experiment, one typically selects one diffraction peak and UV Ultraviolet
measures the amount of diffracted X-rays as a function
of the pump – probe delay or the shift or broadening
of the diffraction peak. The changes in the diffraction
RELATED ARTICLES
peak reflect, for example, the expansion of the lattice
and sound waves bouncing through the crystal..112/ It
Biomedical Spectroscopy (Volume 1)
may be a while before the technique is mature enough
Biomedical Spectroscopy: Introduction ž Fluorescence
to study the time dependence of complete diffraction
Spectroscopy In Vivo ž Infrared Spectroscopy in Micro-
patterns.
biology ž Optical Coherence Tomography

Biomolecules Analysis (Volume 1)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
(EPSRC) and the Royal Society. In addition, we thank
Professor Robin M. Hochstrasser for his support and
guidance over the years.
Infrared Spectroscopy of Biological Applications ž Single
Biomolecule Detection and Characterization
Clinical Chemistry (Volume 2)
Infrared Spectroscopy in Clinical Chemistry ž Ultra-
violet/Visible Light Absorption Spectrophotometry in
Clinical Chemistry
ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNOLOGY AND SPECTROSCOPY
Environment: Trace Gas Monitoring (Volume 3)
Environmental Trace Species Monitoring: Introduction
ž Laser Absorption Spectroscopy, Air Monitoring by
Tunable Mid-infrared Diode ž Laser-induced Breakdown
Spectroscopy, Elemental Analysis
Environment: Water and Waste (Volume 3)
Infrared Spectroscopy in Environmental Analysis
Peptides and Proteins (Volume 7)
X-ray Crystallography of Biological Macromolecules
Atomic Spectroscopy (Volume 11)
Laser Ablation in Atomic Spectroscopy ž Laser-induced
Breakdown Spectroscopy
Electroanalytical Methods (Volume 11)
Ultrafast Electrochemical Techniques
Electronic Absorption and Luminescence (Volume 12)
Fluorescence Imaging Microscopy ž Fluorescence Life-
time Measurements, Applications of
Infrared Spectroscopy (Volume 12)
Infrared Spectroscopy: Introduction
Kinetic Determinations (Volume 12)
Kinetic Determinations: Introduction
Kinetic Determinations cont’d (Volume 13)
Instrumentation for Kinetics
Mass Spectrometry (Volume 13)
Time-of-flight Mass Spectrometry
X-ray Spectrometry (Volume 15)
Structure Determination, X-ray Diffraction for ž Ultra-
fast Diffraction Techniques
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